Archive for the ‘beauty’ Tag

A year ago, I took this picture in Costa Rica. I’d been observing this duo as they made their way daily into town from the twisting jungle. “Puedo saccar una photo de usted, por favor?”

I still utterly adore the beauty of this pair – wisdom and innocence, the hag and the child, a relationship of symbiotic trust and unconditional love. Especially, I revere the quiet and unapologetic sense that these two are completely ‘unspotted from the world.’

Allow me a word about Beauty today. Last post about Truth, this one about Beauty … I’m easy to peg. But honestly, these ultimates play with my gray matter daily, and if you’re awake in the world today, you’ll sooner or later come to contemplate our societal relationship with ideals. Though derided as lofty, even snooty, we’re all essentially concerned with what is Truth and we’re all in love with what is Beautiful.

But the cheapening of beauty, the compromises we tolerate with increasing blindness, is not to be tolerated without a whimper. I’m referring in this instance to the miserable degradation to which we are subjected by the existence of television pharmaceutical commercials.

Could you have guessed that this is my target? You know, you have experienced it. Expensive, warm-fuzzy photography about people achieving health and happiness while the audio furiously clips on about possible side effects, fainting and nausea, four hour erections, headaches, body aches, blood in your friggin’ stool, and all manner of human suffering. Greed and chemical dependency meet The Law and paranoia. The result, now regularly polluting the airwaves, is Ugliness in the extreme to which we’re subjected every time we seek a little entertainment on the tube.

Creativity is in many ways a synthesis of opposites, but it’s a process not guaranteed to be successful. Just throwing things together does not constitute a creative solution; to the contrary, this method can be nothing more than destructive because it does not measure the creative action against the ideals of Truth and Beauty. Most of us don’t need these medications so ubiquitously offered, and those who do are not informed or uplifted by the exercises in contadiction and insult that these commercials present.

I rarely watch television and if these offensively stupid trends in advertising continue, surely that medium will lose all its audience. Commercialism, admittedly, has had little to do with Beauty in the past 50 years or so; but insulting the emotional logic of the consumer, and shoving patently Ugly solutions down our throats is a self-defeating compromise. The sponsors of such messages arrogantly think we don’t notice the assault. Please join me in ensuring that they realize we see through their assinine faux-creativity.